Court records: MPAA sought info on PirateBay founders

TorrentSpy may be gone but its attorneys continue to allege in court that the motion picture industry engaged in a spying campaign against the company as well as others, including the Pirate Bay.

TorrentSpy, a BitTorrent search engine that was driven out of business last March as a result of fighting a copyright suit filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), is seeking another chance to argue that the MPAA wronged the company when it purchased information obtained from a hacker who had pilfered company e-mail.

A federal judge threw out TorrentSpy's hacker complaint last August, saying it was unclear whether federal wiretapping laws covered the interception of e-mails. On Thursday, TorrentSpy's attorneys filed an appeal with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, asking that it reverse the trial court's dismissal of the case.

Included in that heavily redacted legal filing was more detail about the kind of information the MPAA sought from Robert Anderson, who has acknowledged hacking into TorrentSpy's e-mail system. According to TorrentSpy's legal filing, when Anderson initially offered to sell information to the MPAA he promised much.

Anderson wrote to the MPAA: "We can provide the names, address, and phone (numbers) of the owners of Torrentspy.com and Thepiratebay.org--along with evidence, including correspondence between the two companies."

Dean Garfield, an MPAA executive, gave the following testimony, according to the court records: "We were going to get information about the location and identity of the people who were running Torrentspy, as well as information related to a general conspiracy and relationship between Torrentspy and a number of other prominent services including ThePirateBay."

Representatives from the MPAA have always said that Anderson had already obtained the information before offering it to them and told them he had obtained the TorrentSpy e-mails legally. The MPAA did not respond to interview requests.

TorrentSpy's attorney, Ira Rothken, said last August: "We believe that the MPAA, when it paid $15,000 for about 30 pages of e-mails, knew or should have known they were involved in purchasing something in a wrongful manner."